Afterparties by Anthony Veasna So was the best short story collection I’ve read in a while. He’s a gay Cambodian dude from Stockton who died from an overdose at 28 before the book came out. The stories are mostly about Cambodian American teenagers and twenty somethings sort of navigating the dual worlds of their ancestors who survived Polpot and then American commercialism and the kind of ambition and economic possibilities that come with it. Strangely as a white guy from Southern California the way characters spoke to each other reminded me more of me and my friends growing up then almost anything I’ve seen depicted in literature. A favorite quote that I underlined was: “it evoked for me the lee shore in Moby Dick, these supposed safe spaces in which we’d be forever bound, or even the white whale himself, that failed promise of closure. Ben wanted technology to offer people a sense of fulfillment, to rush them to shore, secure everyone to land, and I wanted to be indefinite, free to fuck off and be lost.”
Also reread Moby Dick which is one of my all time faves because I want to allude to it in something that I am writing and wanted to revisit the lee shore chapter. I love Melville’s language and the whole treatment of Ahab.
And I would highly recommend Empire of Pain. It’s about the Sackler family who owned Purdue Pharmacy and unleashed OxyContin on America. It kind of tells the history of the corruption of the American medical industry. One of the original Sackler’s heavily marketed sedatives for a cure all solution back in the 60s and made it a practice to hire former FDA officials, put doctors on payroll to write reviews in medical journals, owned his own medical journal in which he promoted the product, etc. Then when Oxy came out there was a pretty rightful taboo against opiates because how addictive they are and the likelihood for abuse. But through corporate lobbying, an insane legal team, etc. they largely dismantled the taboo among mainstream doctors, where previously they only prescribed opiates for things like cancer pain, Purdue encouraged Oxy’s perpetual usage for all sorts of chronic pain. But they also found plenty of crooked doctors who became pill mills. They were perfectly aware of becoming the largest drug dealer in the country and encouraged their sales staff to milk the pill mills.
It was the time release coating on Oxy that made it easy to abuse where you could just suck off the coating or crunch it up and snort it or melt it down and shoot it up and it hit you all at once. So finally in 2010 under mounting pressure they reformulated the pill so that basically you couldn’t get around the time release, and that’s when the heroin epidemic began. These people created millions of opiate addicts who when these people were finally forced to do the right thing had no other option than to switch to heroin or fentanyl. They’ve paid hundreds of millions in fines, but only a small fraction of Oxy’s profits. And no Sackler’s have served prison time even though the board was full of them. I’m pretty sure I know of three dudes I grew up with who have OD’d during the pandemic alone not to mention my new favorite short story writer. Meanwhile some states are still imprisoning poor people for weed. It’s fucking pathetic.
Topic: books to read (Read 507374 times)